Sheltered inside a nondescript white metal trailer on a cold, misty London-like day in normally sunny South Texas, a technician with Baker Hughes Inc. eyes a three-screen consol rivaling anything Wall Street traders have at their fingertips. In the evening's gloaming, the technician begins manipulating a mouse as he brings 16 deep-blue trucks sporting massive, 2,500-horsepower hydraulic pumps to near full throttle.

The fracing process on stage 11 at Comstock Resources Inc.'s Gloria Wheeler lease in southern McMullen County, Texas, is underway.

As the pumps approach 9,500 pounds per square inch (psi) in hydraulic pressure, a modest vibration rocks the sound-proofed control van as head-phoned technicians in blue coveralls speak in short, crisp commands. To the right, a technician clicks on a screen and initiates the first of five flights that transfer water, gel and 150,000 pounds of white, coarse-grained sand into the Eagle Ford shale two miles below.

It is here that Silicon Valley—the ability to centrally control via computer a remote array of industrial-strength hydraulic horsepower—joins silica, one of the basic earth elements, to free up the oil that is revitalizing America's rising energy production.

The well stimulation crew is part of a transformation in how the industry “does” oil and gas. The crew is executing a zipper frac, or the process of completing stages in stair-step order across two or more laterals. Comstock has drilled four horizontal laterals from four vertical wellbores on a single pad covering 500 square feet of surface on the Gloria Wheeler lease. Alternating stage stimulation in parallel laterals—the zipper concept—is designed to increase fracture complexity and produce more oil or gas than a comparable single lateral frac.

Zipper fracs allow stimulation crews to perform multiple operations simultaneously and shorten the cycle for completing wells. While the crew inside the control van sends a pressurized mix of sand, water and gel downhole in one lateral, another crew outside is preparing wireline equipment and perforating guns for use in the adjacent lateral.

Where one well per pad and a few frac stages had been the industry norm a few years ago, Comstock is applying 125 stages on a single pad site in multiple laterals to the Eagle Ford shale. To the west, the green tower of a Cactus Drilling Co. rig is barely visible in the mist as drilling continues on a separate three-well pad. Immediately to the east, workers have left for the day after assembling a battery of pump jacks on a recently completed pad.

This assembly-line approach to oil and gas is becoming the norm in North American land-based unconventional drilling. Pad drilling and batch completions are part of a productivity surge that, though early, has global implications for energy production.

“Certainly, if you look at what US production has done over the past five years and what it is planned to do over the next few years, I don't think you can say that it is anything other than transformational,” says Andy Hendricks, chief executive for Houston-based Patterson-UTI Energy Inc.

To enjoy reading the rest of this article, please read the February 2014 issue of Oil and Gas Investor.

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